"After destroying North Korea's 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked, "Over a period of three years or so we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population." It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 - 9 million people during the 37-month long "hot" war, 1950 - 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another." (quoted in Richard Rhodes, "The General and World War III," The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p. 53.

Confessed war criminal and General all around psychopath, Curtis Lemay, on the mass murder of nearly a third of North Koreans in the 1950s.

I'm watching the funeral procession on CNN, and it's really over the top. There's a huge portrait of Dear Leader on top of one of the cars in the procession - I've never seen that before. Vintage American limos I think - 1970s Mercurys and Lincolns - with about three dozen black Mercedes sedans - they look new. About a hundred soldiers just fired off a 21 gun salute. The heir to power is walking alongside the hearse, with the faithful crying as it passes by. Doesn't look like the actual funeral service will be televised.

ETA: the 21-gun salute - a lot of blue smoke coming from the rifles when fired, suggesting to me they're either using vintage rifles or poorly manufactured ammo - I think modern rifles are virtually smokeless, but I'm sure someone will be along to correct me.

I think North Korea is a desperate nation trying to hang on to its sovereignty. Unable to pursue communism, they have been in survival mode for a number of years. It most certainly does not represent a military threat to any country in the region as our lapdog news media pretends it is for the sake of justifying our own highest in the world military spending in the most heavily nuclear-armed western nations.

I agree with your first two sentences, Fidel. And I recognize the power imbalance and the propaganda.

On the other hand, it is not entirely a one-sided situation. North Korea has fired missiles over other countries, shelled and killed people, and very likely sunk a ship.

Given that these provocations have not been answered militarily I think NK's neighbours are just as leery about upsetting the balance. So while I think everyone wants to keep the status quo, I think it would be pushing it to say that NK poses no military threat. Its neighbours have very good reason to be on a heightened state of alert.

Yesterday someone on CNN (I forget who it was) said that the US has to improve its missile shield to protect the country from North Korean missiles. I guess NK will continue to be the USA's favourite whipping boy (or however the expression goes).

Yeah they were down to Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro representing the sum total of the evil empire, and Fidel was threatening to retire. Warfiteering hawks had worked themselves into a pretty good panic until they created Al-CIA'da. It's a reprieve for them but still lacking a sufficiently evol enemy with a physical address.

In the north, the young communist heir is removing those who were loyal to his father. In the south, the daughter of the former dictator is leading in the polls.

excerpt:

What has been happening in North Korea recently is straight out of the Hereditary Dictatorship for Dummies handbook.

Kim Jong-un, the pudgy young heir to the leadership of one of the world's last communist states, is removing powerful people who were loyal to his father and replacing them with men (it's always men) who owe their advancement only to him.

excerpt:

Things are done very differently in South Korea. There the presidents are chosen by the free vote of all the people, or at least all the ones who bother to vote. But the candidate most likely to win the presidential elections this December is the daughter of the dictator who ruled the country with an iron hand for two decades, until he was finally assassinated in 1979.

There are, to be sure, some striking differences between Ms. Park Geun-hye, who will probably be South Korea's first female president, and the callow youth who is scrambling to put his stamp on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea up north.

Park has earned her candidacy by a lifetime of public service, including a decade at the head of Yeungnam University and fourteen years in politics, during which she earned the nickname "Queen of Elections" for her skill in delivering the vote to her party even in the most adverse circumstances. At 60, she is more than twice Kim Jong-un's age, and she has seen and done a lot.

On the other hand, it is very unlikely that she would have had this stellar career if she had grown up as the daughter of an army sergeant on a succession of bleak army posts. Growing up in the presidential palace, and serving as South Korea's first lady for five years while still in her early 20s, after her mother was assassinated in 1974, was bound to produce a different outcome. It also helps with the name recognition that every politician needs.

Meanwhile in the USA basically two families have monopolized leadership of cosmetic government in Warshington from 1989 to 2009: the Bush's and the Clinton's. They are all the same guy in the White House. Whether dictatorship or oligarchy, it's the same thing, really.

Your country became a military dictatorship with the signing of the National Security Act in 1947. The U.S. republic was overthrown by a tiny group of militarists, corporatists and bureaucrats. Truman said we'll just stay armed all the time. and Washington has supported dozens of other right wing military and otherwise dictatorships around the world since 1947. U.S. Military spending dwarfs that of North Korea and Cuba and every country Uncle Sam has bombed, invaded or threatened with nuclear weapons since WW II. Sorry you aren't able to see much of anything.

Whether Liberal Democrats, Dixiecrats, Republicans, Neocons etc, they are all the same party of warmongers running for cosmetic government and funded by the corporatocracy. Democratic voices are effectively silenced by big money election campaigns in the U.S. And the war planning department's budget is only ever on the increase. Every U.S. economy is based largely on war and military spending. The U.S. military-industrial complex is a closed economy and mostly dependent on Soviet-style soft budgetary spending at the expense of social democracy in America.

Syria and the vast majority sovereign of nations around the world have little fear that North Korea will threaten them with crippling trade sanctions or military aggression. OTOH, North Koreans fear of U.S. Military aggression and nuclear threats is very real since the 1950's. They were actually attacked and bombed and millions of Koreans died at the hands of U.S. and UN troops. MacArthur threatened to incinerate the North with nuclear weapons in order to draw the Soviet Union and China into a nuclear war. The whole world knew then that the U.S. Military was running the show. The whole world knew then that megalomaniacal psychopaths in the U.S. Military dictatorship were willing to commit mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings in Asia in order to further an imperial agenda.

These are but a few significant differences between the North Korean dictatorship and the inverted totalitarian setup in the USA. Neither system is democratic much less desirable.

Yeah the USA is such a police state that I drove from Texas to Pennsylvania and back early this month (about 2,100 miles) on vacation and never once had to show an ID card or go through a police roadblock/state border check point. But damn those state regulated speed limit signs… they infringe on my right to drive as fast as I want too.

I do lean more toward your assessment, Bec. The U.S. state is selective about whom they target.

On the other hand, I was surprised on my last trip down, in June, that I had to show ID in order to board a commuter train. And of course, there was an overwhelming amount of "report suspicious activity" propaganda everywhere.

That's because you likely didn't arouse suspicion. But it seems that many people otherwise minding their own business do raise suspicion by the fact of their existence, who are routinely asked for their papers, what they're doing, where they're going, where they came from to be on the roads or in travel mode etc; even when doing nothing more than taking a stroll down the sidewalk in many instances. If you were listed as an activist in some Homeland security database for instance, I would argue that your chances of being scrutinized more closely at checkpoints...airports for example...would rise significantly. The mistake you're likely making here is in relying too heavily on your own experience, which doesn't quite cut it you know for the purpose of accurate comparison. I think you'd better served with a wider consultation.